Treesearch

The legality of wood products often depends on their origin, creating a need for forensic tools that verify claims of provenance for wood products. The neotropical tree species Cedrela odorata (Spanish cedar) is economically valuable for its wood and faces threats of overexploitation. We developed a 140 SNP assay for geographic localization of C. odorata specimens. Target capture and short-read sequencing of 46 C. odorata specimens allowed us to identify 140 spatially informative SNPs that differentiate C. odorata specimens by latitude, temperature, and precipitation. We assessed the broad...

Salmon-derived nutrients (SDN) are a distinctive aquatic subsidy to terrestrial ecosystems. Streamwater nutrient increases in response to SDN have been documented but uncertainties about the magnitude and persistence of their effects in riparian areas remain. A key research gap is the response of specific soil types to the nutrient subsidy over time. To address this question, an Entisol and a Spodosol commonly found in riparian zones of Southeast Alaska were delineated adjacent to streams with abundant spawning salmon for experimental nutrient additions. Salmon nutrient additions were...

Many veterans returning from military deployment experience stress- or trauma-related symptoms that make reintegration with civilian society difficult. Nature exposure and outdoor recreation can be important parts of alternative and complementary approaches to reduce symptoms and build on veterans’ pre-existing strengths. Multiple outdoor programs now exist for veterans; many of these occur on federal public lands and present a variety of needs, opportunities, and challenges. This paper relies on interviews (n = 36) with public land managers, program providers and participants, health...

To respond to changing demands for outdoor experiences on public lands, managers and researchers specializing in outdoor recreation and tourism are calling for a shift in the way we think about, study, and manage recreation. New and updated conceptual frameworks and management tools are needed to guide agency decision-makers as they face complex and dynamic outdoor recreation management challenges. This article introduces a research strategy that seeks to align management needs with actionable research on sustainable recreation and tourism. We describe eight Research Focus Areas (RFAs)...

Elk are an iconic species in the Pacific Northwest. The animals are valued as a cultural resource by American Indian tribes, and elk viewing and hunting bring economic and social benefits to many rural communities. Elk forage on grasses, shrubs, and other early-seral vegetation. As timber harvests have declined on federal land in the region over the past 30 years, so has the availability of quality elk forage. At the same time, recreation and other public uses of federal land have increased. As a result, elk are turning to private lands for forage and refuge from human disturbance. This...

The past decade has seen a rapid rise in beaver-related stream restoration (BRR) using beavers and beaver dams (real or artificial) as a tool. Potential benefits of this low-cost, nature-based restoration approach include restoring aquatic and riparian habitat and recovering of threatened species dependent on it, im­proving water availability and stream flow regulation, reducing erosion and stream incision, and sup­porting climate change adaptation. Although the ecological restoration literature acknowledges the im­portance of addressing the human dimensions of restoration. there is a gap...

In heterogeneous landscapes, large herbivores employ plastic behavioral strategies to buffer themselves against negative effects of environmental variation on fitness. Yet, the mechanisms by which individual responses to such variation scale up to influence population performance remain uncertain. Analyses of space-use behaviors exemplify this knowledge gap, because such behaviors are often assumed, but rarely demonstrated, to have direct fitness consequences. We combined fine-scale data on forage biomass and quality with movement data and measures of somatic energy reserves to determine...

The increasing amount of high-severity wildfire in historical low and mixed-severity fire regimes in western US forests has created a need to better understand the ecological effects of different post fire management approaches. For three different salvage prescriptions, we quantified change in stand structural metrics (snag densities and snag basal areas), dead woody fuel loadings, tree regeneration survival, and percentage change in vegetation cover before and after post-fire logging 1 year after the 2015 Stickpin Wildfire on the Colville National Forest in northeastern Washington State,...

Amplified climate warming at high northern latitudes is challenging societies that depend on local provisional and cultural ecosystem services, e.g., subsistence resources, for their livelihoods. Previous qualitative research suggests that climate-induced changes in environmental conditions are affecting rural residents’ ability to travel across the land and access local resources, but detailed information on the nature and effect of specific conditions is lacking. Our objectives were to identify climate-related environmental conditions affecting subsistence travel and access, and then...

We used molar measurements from 136 known-age red tree voles (Arborimus longicaudus) to develop regression models that could estimate tree vole age from skeletonized remains. The best regression included a quadratic structure of the ratio between two measurements, crown height and anterior height, and natural log-transformed age in days. The regression predicted that molar roots begin to develop at 40 days of age and that molar crowns are worn completely away at 1,177 days of age. We used the regression to estimate the age distribution of 1,703 red tree voles found in northern spotted owl...